Strings of Fate
by 1arigato
Summary: "Uneasy, Mou Hitori no?" "Just vigilant," Yami calmly replied, before tossing the two marbles at elevator doors across the room once they chimed open. Yami swiftly typed code into his touchscreen phone for the doors to shut and muffle the alarmed shouts inside as the marble-bombs went off. "For good reason," Yami added. All YGO universes Future/Modern!AU T for violent themes


I set the Pendulum scale between _Duel Monsters_ and _Arc-V!_ Come forth, my tags — disclaimer, Japanese names, Alternate Universe, and violent themes!

You may now read on.

* * *

Yusei had the brand of a criminal. He had been arrested for fleeing the slums but had not been arrested for being involved in a murder – the perfect combination of truths for the agency to wrap up, tie a bow around, and hand back to Yusei as a pretty message: join the agency, or rot in jail. Yusei knew about being used, and he knew about his chances in jail; he understood security technology better than most, and Crow could find escape routes in anything and help him out. So he chose to rot. The agency pressed Yusei to change his mind. Yusei gave them a piece of his mind. They threw him in jail anyway and asked again.

"They say you're a stubborn slum dog."

Stealthy black shirt, daring red jacket, and smirking eyes sparkling with energy and mischief – a complete stranger who looked as if he belonged on the other side of bars. Yusei passively looked up at his visitor.

"Not much for words," the stranger commented jokingly. "You just must be tired. Hey," the visitor said suddenly, "they want me to convince you to join them, but I say follow your instincts. Escaping jail will be easier than the kind of work they're going to throw on you if you join."

Yusei raised a brow. This man was the agency's Plan B for persuasion? "You work for them," he realised.

"I was hired recently," the man admitted, "but long ago enough for what I say about working with the agency to be true."

"That it's harder than breaking out of jail."

"Yup."

"So where's the part where you persuade me?"

"That it's more _fun_ than breaking out of jail."

Yusei looked at his visitor properly, who grinned with a wink and the flick of a hand. "Gotcha," the stranger said. Yusei helplessly smiled; he didn't even have the chance to talk himself out of giving in to the temptation, and the man before him knew it.

* * *

Yugo glanced at the newest member of his clan. "What school did you come from?" he asked.

Wide, round eyes looked back. Goodness. Old gazes were appearing in younger eyes each time. "You Show," the kid, Yuya, replied. Scarlet eyes glanced at the synchro gun holster strapped to Yugo's leg. "Where are you from?"

"Please," Yugo snorted carelessly. "I'm allergic to school. Everything I know about synchro, I learned on the streets."

It was a wonder schools even existed in the area anymore. Civil war had torn the nation Arc apart, and children were dropping out of institutions sooner and sooner as riots forced them out of the streets — or into them in order to defend themselves. Families were no longer complete; all the people had now were "clans," groups of Arc citizens who could trust and protect each other as they tried to stay in one place and feel safe. Most education, from mathematics to technology, was learned and taught during one's stay in a clan. The only reason anyone would leave was because they had a suicidal wish to be shredded by other clans. Most everyone's lives ended still belonging to a clan.

The solid crunching of gravel under rolling rubber alerted Yugo of an approaching tank. He cursed at his luck and drew his synchro gun and a card; when he moved for a detour, Yuya caught his arm.

"There are snipers flanking the tank," the fourteen-year-old nervously whispered. Yugo noticed the glint of scopes and grumblingly pulled Yuya with him behind an overturned car and out of sight from the snipers and the tank's driver. The leather-clad teen released his gun's cartridge, placed his card in the cartridge's rectangle indent, and slid the card-armed cartridge back into the gun. Yuya mimicked his movements with only a hint of hesitancy; not bad for a newbie, Yugo noted. He knew Yuya had never used technology before because the scarlet-eyed teen handled the synchro gun like he had never touched one, and synchro guns were the most common piece of technology out there. That, and fusion metal.

"Take care of the snipers on the right," Yugo instructed. He internally winced because he was originally supposed to show Yuya the ropes in their simple groceries mission, but nothing was a milk run in Arc. "I'll handle the rest of the snipers and the tank." Yuya luckily didn't question Yugo's command, as Yugo was the senior clansman of the two of them, but Yugo still couldn't help but wonder in the back of his mind why he had been partnered up with a complete novice. Yugo had mostly operated alone after losing…her, but with the clan's shrinking size and the lack of proper teachers among members, it wasn't too surprising Yugo had been saddled up with the scarlet-eyed kid. Everyone survived the world in pairs nowadays, though this pair-up looked to be more to Yuya's advantage.

"Yugo," Yuya cut in before Yugo could act, "how do these guns work?"

_Complete novice,_ Yugo repeated in his mind.

"Synchro guns lock on the atomic movement frequency of targets and fire ionised particles that match the breaking frequency to destroy the targets." Yugo curtly ran through the basics. "They are basically nuclear fission laser guns; you just need to slide a card in the cartridge to power them up."

A stray dog to their right suddenly howled in pain with the explosion of its hind leg, and Yugo immediately rose, turned, and shot the sniper responsible, having used the angle of the explosive shot at the dog to pinpoint the sniper's location. Yuya was staring at the shivering dog lying on its side.

"See how the car in front of the dog has a ragged and not clean hole through it?" Yugo pointed out as he retreated back behind the car. "The sniper's gun had locked on to the breaking frequency of flesh, which is less than that for metal, so the ion shot had to struggle its way through the car."

"How can you just say that?" Yuya whispered.

"I don't have time for sentiment," Yugo bluntly replied. "The other snipers haven't pinned our location yet, so they're going to be shooting anything that moves — just like with that dog. They must have a card-sensor…" Yugo mumbled the rest of his thoughts to himself, "but not accurate, so maybe forty yards or so…."

Another explosion went off at the trunk of a tree several paces behind them, and Yugo noted the angle of the explosion to pinpoint and rid of his next target before engaging in a chaotic gunfight with the rest of the snipers and the flustered tank driver. Yuya was gripping his synchro gun like he wished he was holding anything else. A pendulum hung under his shirt, hidden from even Yugo's sharp eyes.

Lasers exploded straight through poles, rubble, and cars in search of two warm bodies — Yugo and Yuya — and above the noise, a whine pierced Yuya's heart. Looking away from his target, Yuya rose his Magician of Astromancy-armed gun and fired. Around the same time, Yugo daringly shot at the tank to rid of the biggest player, but he didn't even dent it.

"The armour is too strong," Yugo swore. "I need a higher-level card!"

"Level?" Yuya repeated, with a shaking voice but steady hands.

"The energy range of cards is categorised by levels," Yugo explained distractedly as he fumbled with his gun. "The higher the level, the higher the maximum frequency. Learn that quick, newbie, else you die young." He victoriously slid his Clear Wing Synchro Dragon card-loaded cartridge into his gun and aimed. Yuya could see the difference immediately; Yugo's new shot flew straight and true like a clear-cut glass arrow filled with light that sang from start to finish, piercing a fist-sized hole through the tank. Yugo's gun wasn't even smoking from the effort.

"Why not use ranks to categorise ranges?" Yuya asked as he replaced his own gun back into its holster. All the enemies were now dead.

Yugo immediately adopted an offended expression. "Ranks are for describing the difficulty level of Xyz; the more complicated the Xyz technology, the higher the rank."

The levels versus ranks system was awfully confusing. "Why haven't I heard of Xyz before?"

"Because it officially doesn't exist, and its prototypes are impossibly difficult to use," Yugo replied curtly, turning to Yuya and noting how Yuya's gun was slightly smoking and yet no enemy had been killed by a shot that wasn't Yugo's. "Look, newbie. No Xyz technology is complete or safe, so you may as well forget about anything I've said. Review what you know about synchro guns. You nearly blew your head off today." Yugo pivoted and stole past the tank, not bothering to wait for Yuya to follow. Yuya glanced at his card holster which carried an extra card inside with worried eyes, before looking away and running to catch up to Yugo. The dog that had been suffering from the explosive loss of its hind leg was now peacefully lying on its side with a clean hole through its head.

* * *

"Can't you work any faster?" Yami grumbled, not at Yugi, but at the computer. Their ace card Black Magician had been inserted into the old piece of tech, and Yugi was hitting keys the fastest he could, but the hacking progress was still slow. The building rumbled with the collision of massive forces several floors below, and Yami's eyes flicked to the clock in the room. He didn't tell his partner how much time they had left. Knowing Yugi, he had a mental timer ticking in his head while code simultaneously ran from brain to fingertips. Yami unclipped two red marbles from his belt.

"Uneasy, Mou Hitori no?" Yugi used the familiar nickname.

"Just vigilant," Yami calmly replied, before tossing the two marbles at elevator doors across the room once they chimed open. Yami swiftly typed code into his touchscreen phone for the doors to shut and muffle the alarmed shouts inside as the marble-bombs went off. "For good reason," Yami added. With the elevator down, no one would dare try to reach the room they were in now — especially as the room was actually office to a criminal leader who could afford bulletproof windows, one-foot-thick reinforced walls, but not a fast computer. The building shook again.

"Strange," Yami mumbled to himself. The building security and the criminal leader's henchman on Yami and Yugi's tail should have been wiped out with the final attack at the elevator.

The elevator dinged.

"Aibou—" Yami shouted, but an explosion that blasted the elevator doors flying across the room cut off his next words, and Yami shoved Yugi down with him to the floor with arms shielding his partner's head from possible debris as he fumbled for marbles — blue ones, this time — and threw them at the source of the explosion. There was a cock of a gun that made Yami smirk at the mistake, but a thrown kama intercepted the marbles just in time to set them off at a safe distance.

The kama's glowing blade exploded from a fatal short-circuiting caused by Yami's blue marbles, and a normal metal kama fell to the floor. Yami only had time to feed Curse of Dragon into a fusion metal device that produced a modest force field before a clean, singing, _powerful_ synchro shot laughed at the force field and destroyed the one-foot-thick reinforced wall past it. Yami's eyes involuntarily widened a little.

What the _heck?_

He unclipped two more blue marbles just before a soothing but energetic voice cut in with, "Let's everyone cool our jets, because we're on the same team!" The smoke revealed a friendly-faced brunette with another kama in hand and a leather-clad male with a flat expression. Yami noted the criminal mark and the synchro gun aimed at the now destroyed wall, and tensed. "Same team?" he echoed.

"Kaiba-san judged that his two hackers were taking too long," the brunette chirped. "We're your security and clean-up crew. You two are Yami-san and Yugi-san, right? Is it true you guys are the Pharaoh and the King of Games?" At the last sentence, the synchro-user lowered his gun and looked at Yami and Yugi with humble respect.

Yugi bumped Yami's back with his shoulder, still typing furiously at the ancient keyboard with a serene face. "The kama and the gunshot weren't aimed at us," he said. Yami thought back to the ideal disarming technique against his marbles and the deliberate shot aimed high at a wall, and noted with affection that he often forgot that his partner had incredibly fast insight.

At Yami's nod, the brunette's eyes sparkled with childish admiration, and his partner stopped him with a gloved hand from delaying their mission with a plea for an autograph. "Plug the computer into a fusion battery and take it with you," the synchro-user tossed a battery their way, "we have to leave this building before it self-detonates."

Yami inserted Curse of Dragon into the fusion battery, plugged a wire between the target computer and the battery, and unplugged the original wire from the room's outlet as Yugi continued to diligently hack with infinite patience and efficiency.

"Self-detonates?" Yami echoed. The brunette hummed affirmative as he picked up his disabled fusion kama, and Yami noted a third kama strapped on the brunette's back.

"A building feature smuggled into existence by this criminal leader's rivals," began the explanation. "You wouldn't find it in this building's database, so don't kick yourself. It's actually cool that you can literally _explosively_ hack with marbles like you did to disable the elevator and the special fusion feature of my kama. Yusei and I nearly died being squashed by that elevator if he had not blasted it in time. It was with clever hacking that he brought the elevator cables back to life for an easier time climbing the shaft." The brunette glanced back at Yusei with a wry grin. "If Yusei had shot the marbles you threw at us after, though, the marbles would have caused explosions right up to the very gun in his hand, no time for hacking."

It was Yami and Yugi's turn to look at Yusei with humble respect. "You hacked back at the disabled elevators?" Yami clarified. Granted, the red marbles had the weakest code of the three colours, but "Osiris" was the third most unbreakable code in the world. Yami and Yugi knew so, because they had invented the other two strongest.

Yusei shuffled in embarrassment and gestured at the hole in the wall. "Our ride is outside." The subject-change successfully, albeit reluctantly, redirected the pharaoh and king's attention. Yami's lips twitched down in a contemplative frown when he heard chopping of helicopter blades yet saw no ladder or rope. "We're not going to—"

"Jump!"

The brunette pushed Yami and Yugi through the hole in the wall, and Yusei pressed a button on his belt before jumping out as well. At the summon of a button, his Yusei-Go automatically drove up and off an unfinished highway bridge before driving on the building's face at a slope. It greeted Yusei in his aerial descent, and Yusei slipped himself into his seat and drove down the side of the building for Yami and Yugi ahead, who he caught in time to rev and jump off the building onto a dumpster, before taking a bumpy but successful landing on solid ground.

The same time Yusei had leapt out of the top floor, criminal underlings had burst into the room, their helicopters having arrived at the rooftop too late for anything but an attempt to catch a glimpse of who could be hacking into the criminal leader's files. Judai replaced the spare kama on his back with his disabled one, and he greeted the late underlings with an excited grin and two activated kamas, their glowing blades capable of slicing through bone and steel.

"Gotcha."

Racing down city streets without headlights on for a stealthy getaway, Yusei heard Yugi's sigh of relief in finally completing his hack into the computer and caught sight of a paraglider in his rear view mirrors several minutes later. Yami noticed Judai as well, and couldn't help a faint, content smile. Yet another mission accomplished in the shadows of an oblivious world.

* * *

The four of them made a good team. They were the agency's only field operatives, but they had better results when all four were sent on a mission together instead of two pairs spread out in different locations with separate missions. Team missions were rare, but the four of them treasured their shared time together. They never expected the agency to add to its staff. Until Kaiba ambushed them with a brief introduction.

They blinked. "He's a kid," Yugi argued.

"He won the world championships," Kaiba bluntly replied.

The four of them stared.

"I had a lot of help and support," Yuma defended with an embarrassed shuffle.

"You're thirteen," Judai stated. "You're – goodness – you should be starting seventh grade!"

"He won the championships last year," Kaiba elaborated. "At age _twelve._"

"I've already studied most of what I'm supposed to learn in seventh grade," Yuma shared. "I'm going to finish the rest of it while I fulfill my main mission of protecting Mokuba."

Yusei exhaled in relief. "So you're not a field operative? You're not going to do field work?"

"Occasionally," Yuma's partner, Astral, replied. "President Kaiba has said our skills should not be ignored."

"I think the four of us is enough for any sort of mission that operatives may have thrown their way," Yami said with a pointed stare at Kaiba.

"They both start tomorrow." Kaiba ignored Yami. "Dismissed."

* * *

The widespread use of fusion material and synchro guns led to a competitive spirit among even pre-teens over who could use the technology more masterfully. With a card level limit and a sports carnival feel, the World Championships were born, held in different places on the globe every year.

Heartland City had hosted the second most recent one, and Heartland's amusement park take on the championships meant that winners weren't clear until the final four, where spars determined the victor. Everyone watching remembered the blood-pumping duels that ran at such a fast pace, even those who watched live couldn't specifically remember if fusion technology or synchro guns were used.

Those who watched live could never forget, however, what they witnessed at the final duel that would determine the World Champion.

A sixth-grade boy and his friend had knocked the back of their dominant hands together and rose them with a shout, unleashing something so new and powerful, the cameras recording the fight had short-circuited, and the boy and his friend had won. A believable story of how the duel went was released, and those who watched the finale live were intimidated into playing along with the cover-up and to take what they had witnessed with them down to their graves.

Any good reporter knew that the Heartland country was dipping into new technology, but no one knew if the "Xyz" technology was even close to moving past development. No one suspected a middle school boy to stand at the centre of a secret conspiracy unless they witnessed supporting evidence with their own eyes – the Championship finale. And so, with the world oblivious, Xyz tech spread out through manipulation and underground channels, cradling Heartland in its palm and moving past borders into Arc like an invisible virus. Xyz was superior; it was the future. Or so its creators wanted to believe.

Yuma couldn't agree, and after life-threatening battles and acts of heroism between him, his friends, and even his enemies – battles that the world would never know of – Xyz technology was prodded towards a less dark path – thrown back to "in-development" status in inner Heartland's best labs and picked apart more safely, though Yuma and his friends were allowed to keep their technology with unspoken rules between them. A year later, the country of Arc took the liberty of hosting the World Championships, where poor coverage proved that bad luck had been upon the championships ever since Yuma and Astral's finale, and now hardly anyone but the fanatically devoted kept track of the current championships.

That same year, Yuma and Astral were approached.

Yuma knew of Kaiba Seto, President of Kaiba Corp and co-founder of the World Championships with the late Pegasus J. Crawford, but Yuma and Astral learned of Kaiba's _unofficial_ line of work when the president confronted them with a job offer and a team of synchro snipers at stand-by should Yuma or Astral snap. It wasn't in their nature to do so, but considering their mastery over an impossible technology officially still in development….

"Please…protect Mokuba." _The brother I live for._

Yuma couldn't say no.

* * *

A/N: We have here stories and back-stories between people seemingly unconnected, but we YGO fans know better…. (Wink.) No pairings – just friendship, plot, and action.

I _love_ it when in-universe crossovers happen. (Especially when they're canon. Can I hear a JACK ATLAAAAS for that Arc-V opening, anyone?)

Please leave a comment below!


End file.
